The engine of a farm machine is usually equipped with a cooling system comprising a heat exchange assembly including one or more radiators, typically a radiator for engine cooling, an intercooler and a radiator for gearshift oil cooling; in some cases the heat exchange assembly can also include a radiator belonging to an air conditioning unit of the farm machine cabin. Radiators are arranged so as to receive each a cooling air flow directed perpendicularly to their respective front surface.
Traditionally, the heat exchange assembly is housed within a front bonnet of the machine, equipped with grille-like ventilation openings, provided on the side and/or on the front of said bonnet. Normally, said grille-like openings are designed to keep large-size impurities outside and enable an air filtration degree ensuring for most working activities in the fields a certain number of working hours before both the grilles and the radiators get choked up. Under extreme conditions, i.e. when the machine works in highly contaminated conditions, the grille-like openings are not able to ensure a sufficiently high filtering degree to prevent radiators from getting choked up. This is for instance the case in which the farm machine works in conditions of high concentration of air impurities (such as chaff, residues of cutting-up or haymaking operations, seeds, graminaceous plants or infesting weeds, poplar inflorescences, etc.), which can generally pass through hood grilles and choke up radiators, due the action of the cooling air flow. The consequent risk is an engine over-heating with subsequent performance loss. Under these conditions the operator should stop working operations, get off the machine, remove and clear bonnet grilles, reach the heat exchange assembly and clean it. Note that too high a filtration degree carried out by bonnet grille-like openings would jeopardize the passage of cooling air under normal conditions, i.e. during most of the working operations performed by the machine.
Cleaning operations on the heat exchange assembly are particularly uncomfortable since they have to be carried out in the fields.
A known solution, aiming at simplifying the aforesaid cleaning operations, envisages to arrange the various radiators orthogonal one to the other, so that their respective front surfaces are directly accessible for manually removing impurities by an operator. Said solution results in a large size of the heat exchange assembly and difficulty in managing several cooling air flows, which have each to pass through a respective radiator.
In most cases, however, the various radiators are arranged parallel to one another, in sequence and very close one to the other, so that the radiator pack thus formed can receive a cooling air flow directed perpendicularly to one of its front surfaces; said solution greatly simplifies assembly cooling, since the same air flow can pass through all radiators provided for. One or more radiators of such assembly can be mounted onto cross guides, so as to be laterally shifted after lifting the machine bonnet, in order to carry out cleaning and washing operations. The room available in the engine compartment of the machine, however, is usually quite narrow, which enables only a partial extraction of the concerned radiator with respect to the remaining part of the heat exchange assembly; this makes cleaning operations difficult and does not allow to remove completely foreign bodies from the whole front surface of the radiator partially taken out.